It is no wonder that company
management looks at maintenance with a jaded perspective. Many of them still think of maintenance as a
necessary evil that is just a cost of doing business.
I am referring to failed
reliability improvement initiatives. Research conducted at Reliabilityweb.com
shows that approximately 85% of these improvement initiatives fail to create
sustainable business gain.
Some improvement efforts do
makes things better for a little while but then they return to the previous
state or worse. We call this
“bureaucratic elasticity”. Like a rubber
band being stretched outward, it only remains in that position while it is
being held. Once released it returns to
its original position.
Maintenance leaders often
follow the “silver bullet” approach because they met some “expert” who sure
seemed credible as they explained the “only way” to make improvements. (The “only way” also happened to be the
method that this consultant knew about).
If your maintenance consultant is telling you about the “one way” to
make the journey to high-performance reliability, run away fast. There is no such thing.
Things like
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), Computerized Maintenance Management
Systems (CMMS), Predictive Maintenance (PdM) or Maintenance planning and
scheduling are all fantastic improvement strategies and tools, however the
power for change is not resident in the tools themselves.
Do you recall Wile E. Coyote,
the Warner Brothers cartoon character that was always trying to capture and eat
the Roadrunner?
I do not know where he got
his budget but his wily mind was able to engineer very elaborate plans using a
wide variety of strategies, tools and technologies (all available from Acme
Manufacturing), however none of them ever delivered a meal to his plate.
Of course as maintenance
reliability leaders, we need to use any strategy, technology and tool that will
help us reach our performance goals, but the lessons of the last 30 years have
demonstrated that creating a sustainable high-performance reliability level is
not a by-the-book journey.
Since 2006, Uptime Magazine
has hosted the Best Maintenance Reliability Program Award or Uptime Awards for
short. Over the years we have found 7
traits that each of these winning high-performance programs share:
1) Each program developed
maintenance and condition monitoring tasks based on criticality ranking and
failure modes and effects analysis. In other words they understood how their
machines failed and how important they were to company goals. They directed maintenance activity to detect
or prevent potential failures on the right machines at the right time.
2) Each program had earned a
high level of active corporate support and respect by starting small, assessing
the result, improving, then expanding.
Company leadership did not simply endorse the reliability improvement
program; they understood it and actively guided it so it could survive competing
initiatives and temporary loss of faith.
3) Each program excelled in
communicating up the chain, down the chain and across the chain. All
stakeholders and interested parties had a high awareness about the
benefits of the program.
4)
Each program included short and long-term training and certification for team
members that were far higher than what we typically find in lower performance
companies
5)
Each program included passionate and energetic people who were highly motivated
to perform at high levels. Many of these people had no management
authority however they were clearly leaders who possessed initiative.
6)
These programs reported gains in safety, productivity and reliability on a
regular basis to justify and sustain the reliability improvement program.
7)
Each program subjected itself to annual assessment in order to identify current
gaps, and then created follow-up plans to close those gaps. They expect
to continually improve with no end in sight. If you have been through an
honest assessment, you know how painful it can be.
Are you still chasing the
roadrunner?
Here are some resources that
might be useful for your journey
What are your thoughts about
creating a sustainable high-performance reliability program?
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